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Did cars have seatbelts in the 1960s?

I looked through some of my grandfather's old photos, and he was a huge car fanatic. He has six classic cars, one of which he gave to my mom as her first car. But I didn’t notice any of them wearing seatbelts in photos—did vehicles in the 1960s have seatbelts?

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Andrea Barrett · Updated on
Reviewed by Shannon Martin, Licensed Insurance Agent.
Most cars did not have seatbelts in the early 1960s, but they started becoming common in cars in the mid-60s. Before then, seatbelts were seen as a menace. The public wasn’t interested in being safe when riding in a vehicle. In fact, it was actually the opposite: If a car manufacturer incorporated too many safety innovations into their cars, it was assumed that the car wasn’t safe enough on its own.
As thought went, “you didn’t need a seatbelt if your car was like a Sherman Tank on whitewall tires.”
Once the mid-1960s hit, people started to realize that seatbelts could prevent injury or death in a crash. And while the public was stubborn, education and time won out, and most states implemented seatbelt laws by the late 1980s.
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